Duel at Araluen Page 13

  One of his men was standing close by and staring up the hill at the two figures, his mouth slightly open.

  “Get me a white flag!” Trask demanded. The man dashed away and returned a few minutes later with a large white cloth fixed to the top of a spear shaft. “Come with me,” Trask ordered. “You too,” he added, indicating two of his staff.

  With the white flag standing out in the morning breeze, he began to trudge up the hill, his feet slipping from time to time on the long, smooth grass. As he began to make his way upward, the two men at the top of the hill started down.

  The two groups were separated from each other by two of the terraces when Horace held up his hand for Trask to stop.

  “That’s far enough!” he said.

  Trask hesitated, then pointed to the white flag his soldier held. “You can trust us,” he said. But Horace laughed in reply. Trask tried again. “If we talk here, we’ll have to shout to make ourselves heard.”

  “So shout,” Horace said. In fact, that was the reason he had called on them to stop. He wanted the enemy leader to be forced to speak loudly, so the surviving prisoners in the fort would hear what their commander said.

  Trask shrugged, realizing that his enemy was not going to give in on this point. He also realized that the second man, the Ranger, had an arrow nocked to his bow, although he kept the weapon lowered and hadn’t drawn it back. But if Trask tried to move farther up the hill, it would take only seconds for the man to draw and shoot, and Trask knew that he would be the Ranger’s first target if a fight started. As he had the thought, his wounded arm throbbed painfully, and he rubbed it.

  “I assume you want to discuss terms for surrender?” Trask called.

  Again, Horace gave a short laugh. “Do you want to surrender?”

  The Sonderlander reacted indignantly. “Of course not! I mean your surrender!”

  Horace shook his head contemptuously. “Not today, I think,” he said. “But I want to discuss our prisoners. We have a dozen of your men, some of them injured. We’re willing to return them to you. They need medical treatment.”

  “So you’ll burden me with them?” Trask asked him.

  Horace raised his eyebrows in surprise. “They’re your men,” he pointed out. Such exchanges were quite normal between opposing forces—although, in this case, Trask had none of Horace’s men to exchange for his own.

  Trask said nothing, aware that the men with him would overhear and that, if he abandoned their wounded, word would go round the camp in minutes.

  “I also thought you might want to take the bodies of the men who were killed, so they can be buried properly,” Horace said. “We’re willing to give a working party free access. They’ll need to be unarmed, of course.”

  Trask hesitated for a long minute. If he refused this chance to provide decent burial for his dead, he knew it would be an unpopular move with his men. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Very well. I’ll send ten men—ten unarmed men—to gather the bodies for burial.”

  “And the prisoners?” Horace pressed.

  But Trask shook his head. “You can keep them! They’re cowards and failures!” he snapped.

  Horace smiled grimly and dropped his hand to the hilt of the long sword at his side. “You’re welcome to step up here and see if you can do any better,” he invited.

  But Trask wasn’t having any of it. He touched the bloodstained bandage around his upper arm. “I’m wounded,” he said.

  “Of course you are,” Horace said with a grim laugh. “Very well: ten men, unarmed. Have them up here in an hour. They may need a cart to take the bodies down.”

  He paused, waiting for a response, but Trask said nothing. Horace allowed a faint smile to touch his lips. “You may go now,” he said and, turning his back on the Sonderland leader, he began to retrace his steps up the hill.

  The Ranger remained facing Trask, the arrow still ready on his bow, his eyes watchful. With a muttered curse, Trask turned on his heel and began to work his way back down the hill, slipping and sliding as he went.

  Inside the fort, Horace climbed to the walkway, where one of the captured mercenaries had been standing near the gate, watching the scene below.

  “You heard what your leader thinks of you?” Horace said.

  The man’s lip curled in contempt. “I heard.”

  Horace pointed to the compound below, where the other survivors were gathered inside the gate. Four of them, the more seriously wounded, were on makeshift stretchers.

  “You’re free to go,” Horace told him. “You can rejoin your comrades, or head for the coast. It makes no difference to me.”

  “We could stay and join you?” the mercenary suggested.

  But Horace shook his head. “I don’t think so. Once you turn your coat, it can become a habit. I’m not sure I could trust you.”

  Ten minutes later, the gate opened and the prisoners began filing down the hill, the less seriously injured carrying their comrades on the stretchers.

  18

  Dimon leaned against the windowsill and peered up at the south tower, a scowl marking his usually handsome features.

  He was in a bedchamber on the top floor of the keep. The squat, solid central tower was several floors lower than the four graceful, soaring towers set at each corner of the castle and connected by the high curtain walls that ran between them. From this vantage point, he could look up to the balcony running around the top of the south tower, below the pointed, conical roof that surmounted it.

  He had been here for over an hour, keeping watch on the comings and goings above him while he thought about his next possible course of action. As he watched, he could see Cassandra’s men patrolling the balcony regularly, keeping an eye out for any possible movement in the compound below.

  Twice, he had seen Cassandra herself peering over the parapet. Each time, his lips had drawn back in a snarl and he had cursed quietly. He had become fixated on the princess. She had proven to be a more capable opponent than he expected. He knew she had a reputation from her younger days—a reputation for courage and leadership. But he assumed that the tales of her previous exploits—in Skandia when she was a teenager and later in Arrida when she had delivered the ransom that set Erak, Oberjarl of the Skandians, free from captivity—had been carefully embroidered and exaggerated over the years by sycophantic admirers and hangers-on. There was no shortage of such people in a royal court, he knew.

  But it appeared that her reputation was well founded. She had reacted quickly and effectively to his seizure of the castle, leading her people to their virtually unassailable position in the south tower.

  He had tried to drive her from her refuge by brute force. But her blocking of the stairway rendered that attempt unsuccessful—and expensive in terms of the lives of his men. The trebuchet seemed to be a good idea, until he realized that the sandstone rocks it could hurl were virtually useless against the hard granite walls of the tower. He had hoped that the fire bladders might have broken the morale of the defenders in the tower—or at least caused casualties as they spread their sticky tendrils of flame among the men and equipment holding out on the ninth floor.

  And for a while, it seemed that they might have the desired effect. The sudden showers of fire that they unleashed on the defenders were causing alarm and panic. He had witnessed that from this same window.

  But then the inexcusable carelessness of his men in leaving the supply of fire bladders piled on the platform of the trebuchet led to disaster. The blackened, twisted wreckage in the courtyard below attested to that fact.

  He could build another siege machine, but that would take days. And his men would be wary of manning it. He had lost several to arrows from above, and another two had been badly burned when the stockpile of fire bladders had ignited and exploded. But the bigger problem facing him was time.

  Each day, he climbed to the castle wall and scanned the horizo
n to the north, looking anxiously for any sign of approaching troops. There had been no reports from the north, where Horace’s force was trapped in the hill fort. And that meant that Horace’s position was secure—as was Cassandra’s here at Castle Araluen. If the mercenaries surrounding the fort had broken through and defeated the defenders, they would have been quick to send word. In this case, no news was bad news.

  He didn’t deceive himself that Horace and Gilan would stay confined. They were too skillful, too clever and altogether too experienced in battle for that to happen. Sooner or later, he realized, they would break free and head south again.

  And even if they didn’t manage to force their way out, the Sonderland troops wouldn’t stay in place indefinitely. Mercenaries fought for profit—for the pay they received and for the plunder they could take from defeated enemies, whether it was weapons, valuables, armor or ransom money. And if they weren’t getting them—and, even worse, could see little prospect of doing so—they would soon melt away and find richer fields to conquer.

  So he knew that the longer he took to winkle Cassandra out of her defensive position, the greater the chance became that Horace and his force of disciplined, highly trained troops would arrive back here to set her free. Time was running out.

  He racked his brains as he stared at the tall, impregnable tower facing him. He had tried force and Cassandra had defeated him. He had tried to trick her, promising to set her and her cursed brat of a daughter free, telling her that the hill fort had fallen and Horace was dead. And he had tried to batter the tower down, and then hurl fire and devastation at the tower with his trebuchet.

  And each time, Cassandra had countered his attempts to oust her.

  Now there was only one course that he could think of. He shook his head bitterly, looking again at the terrace above him, hoping to catch some sight of the woman who had become his enemy and his bane. But there was no sign of her, and he turned away, heading for the door and the stairway that led to the lower floors of the keep.

  * * *

  • • •

  Cassandra was in the storeroom with Ingrid, taking inventory of the supplies of food that were available. The fresh food that had been stockpiled here was almost gone. But there was plenty of salted and smoked and dried food left—enough to last them for months.

  “We’ve plenty of flour,” Ingrid told her. Maddie’s former maid had taken on the job of quartermaster, organizing meals for the defenders. “See, we can bake fresh bread each day. No butter. But we have enough oil for at least a month.”

  “Try to organize it so we vary the meals each day,” Cassandra told her. “Dried and preserved food can become monotonous, so keep changing it up.”

  Ingrid nodded. She had developed a good working relationship with the soldier who had taken on the duties of chef. Thank goodness he wasn’t a real chef, the girl thought. She couldn’t have coped with a chef’s overbearing manner and readiness to take offense at any sign of someone else interfering in his work.

  “I’ll talk to Proctor,” she said. “We’ll come up with a schedule so we don’t serve the same meal too often.”

  “That’ll help. You could also—”

  “My lady! You need to come quickly!” Whatever else Ingrid could do was forgotten as a soldier pushed open the storeroom door, saw Cassandra, and called to her. She turned away from the racks and shelves of barrels and jars facing her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  The man gestured roughly in the direction of the stairwell. “It’s Dimon,” he told her. She had instructed all her men to refrain from calling their enemy “Sir Dimon” or using any other honorific. “He says he must talk to you.”

  “Must he indeed?” Cassandra said mildly. For a moment, she considered sending a message back to the rebel leader, along the lines of his taking a flying leap into the moat. Then she realized that such an action would serve no good purpose.

  “I’ll come,” she said to the soldier at the door. “Keep on with the inventory, Ingrid. We’ll go over it tonight and plan a schedule of meals.” She smiled to herself. Such were the duties of a leader: count barrels of beans and bacon and flour one moment; talk to the enemy commander the next. I suppose one never gets bored with a life like this, she thought.

  “Very well, my lady,” Ingrid said. She took the list and the charcoal pencil Cassandra had been using and continued with the stocktake while Cassandra led the way to the stairwell.

  “Did he say what he wanted?” she asked the soldier.

  But he shook his head. “No, my lady. Just to talk to you is all.”

  She went down the interior stairs to the eighth floor, then headed across to the doorway leading to the spiral staircase that ran the full height of the tower. There was a soldier on duty there, watching and listening for any sign that the enemy might be trying to bridge the gap in the stairway. He nodded to her as she approached.

  “Dimon is on the stairs, my lady,” he said.

  Cassandra, ever wary of treachery from the former guard commander, peered carefully around the stone wall. She could see the stairs winding down below her, and the timber wall blocking the gap where her men had removed a three-meter section of steps.

  “Dimon?” she called experimentally. She heard movement on the steps below. Presumably someone had gone to fetch the traitor. A minute or so later, she heard his voice. As ever, the sound of it made her blood surge with hatred.

  “Is that you, Cassandra?”

  “Who did you think it might be?” She found it hard to maintain a civil conversation with Dimon. He had lied to her and tried to trick her on so many occasions that she approached any conversation with him with total suspicion. When he didn’t reply, she sighed and called down the stairwell, “Yes. It’s me. What did you want?”

  “I want to talk to you,” came the response.

  “You seem to be doing that. Stop beating around the bush and tell me what you want.”

  There was another long pause, then he said, in a dejected voice, “I just want to say that you’ve won.”

  She took a half pace back, startled by his admission. This was the last thing she had expected to hear. Threats, yes. Another ultimatum, or perhaps a proposal for a truce. Yes. But an admission of defeat? She shook her head, looked at the two soldiers standing beside her. They looked as puzzled as she was. One of them, the one who had come to fetch her, frowned and shook his head.

  “I’ve won?” she repeated. She was caught unprepared by the statement. She had no answer for him other to repeat what he had told her, and wait to see what he proposed now.

  “I’ve tried everything I could. I should have thought of this damned tower, should have remembered how impregnable it can be. But you’ve outthought me at every turn. Everything I’ve tried, you’ve had a counter for. And now I’m done.”

  “And so . . . ?” she queried. This defeated tone was totally unfamiliar to her. She didn’t trust it. She was searching for the trick in his words, thinking furiously to see what deception he might have in mind.

  “I’m out of time, Cassandra. It’s as simple as that. Any day now, Horace will be back with his men, and that’ll be the end for me. So I’m getting out while the getting is good.”

  “You told me he was dead,” she said accusingly.

  There was a long pause before he replied. “I was lying. You knew that. Or at least, you suspected it.”

  She frowned, thinking furiously. Had he just given something away when he said Horace would be back any day? Had Horace broken out of the hill fort? She temporized. “You’re inside the castle. You could hold him off for months if you want to,” she said.

  He gave a short bark of laughter—but the sound was devoid of any humor. “Do you think that’s what I want? To be captive here in the castle while he mobilizes the army and begins a real siege? To be trapped, with no way of escaping? No. I know when I’m beaten.
I know when it’s time to throw in my cards. If I go now, I’ve got a chance of reaching the coast and getting out of this country.”

  “Where will you go?” she asked. She was genuinely puzzled by this sudden change of heart. All she could think was that Horace had escaped and Dimon was panicking as he waited for her avenging husband to appear over the horizon. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Horace was a fearsome warrior and he would make a terrifying enemy—particularly of a man who had betrayed his wife and then tried to kill her. If Horace was on the loose, and heading south, Dimon would be well advised to show a clean pair of heels, as soon as possible.

  “Sonderland,” was the surprising reply. “They can always use troop commanders. I’ll join them as a mercenary. Don’t try to come after me. And tell Horace not to try to track me down. The Sonderlanders look after their own.”

  “I imagine they do,” she said, still trying to see beyond his words, still searching for the trick that she felt must be concealed here. Why tell her he was leaving if he didn’t, actually, leave?

  “So you’ve come to congratulate me, have you?” she said after a pause. Again she heard the bitter laugh echo in the stairwell.

  “No. I’ve come to tell you you’ve won. But you’ve been lucky. If my men hadn’t left those oil bladders stored where you could set fire to them, it might have been a different story. I would have rained fire on you from that trebuchet until you and your men were burned to cinders. I’ll be pulling out tomorrow with my men. You can watch us go. But don’t feel too smug about it. One day, I’ll come back. And I’ll finish what I started. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next year. But one day, when you least expect it.”